Digital Rain

The latest solo album from the leader of Chromatics is a full-scale concept album about inclement weather.

Like a film noir director shooting lamp-lit city streets at midnight drenched in rain, Johnny Jewel is enamored of the look and sound and feel of water. Dried out in Los Angeles, the Chromatics mastermind has been thinking about the hail in his native Houston and the snow in Montreal, Gulf Coast floods, and downpours in Portland, the city where he crystallized his twilit sound. “After living a few years in a desert climate, I realized I was nostalgic for the constant presence of precipitation from every city I once called home,” he recently wrote. Digital Rain is his response to that torrid absence.

Jewel’s music—whether on his own, or as a composer for television and film, or with his bands Glass Candy, Desire, and Chromatics—has always captured less a style or sound than a mood. His work around the production of Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive (most of which went unused in the finished film) was so intensely expressive of a menacing, neon-lit Los Angeles that it all but coined a genre. His collaboration last year with David Lynch on the soundtrack to “Twin Peaks: The Return,” provided some of the show’s defining aesthetic pleasures, in particular his moody theme for Kyle MacLachlan’s Dougie Jones (“Windswept,” the title track from Jewel’s last solo album) and his otherworldly performances on stage at the Roadhouse with Chromatics and Julee Cruise. His talent is for atmosphere. He’s at his strongest when he’s encouraged to indulge it.

Digital Rain does indeed sound wet. Composed without drums, vocals, or guitars, it’s a synth-streaked cloudburst, an electronic squall. A minute-long interlude called “Monsoon” churns and seethes. “La Ville De Neige” quivers with an expansive, frosty calm. The thunderstorms of “Magma” fizzle out into a gentle drizzle, while delicate slabs of ambience hang like mist on “What If?.” You get it. All these moody invocations of raindrops drumming on the windshield of a car as it glides down the highway at night seem carefully calibrated to resonate in precisely such a literal way. Digital Rain doesn’t merely bring to mind precipitation. It’s a full-scale concept album about inclement weather.

The album is another of Jewel’s complete recreations of an aura. With austere means, he summons an often exquisite vision of a world of ice and water, snow and rain. And while its 41 minutes are largely tranquil, flowing smoothly with the aplomb of electronic artists Loscil or Keith Fullerton Whitman, the record sometimes erupts into sudden showers and storms. On “Air Museum,” one can feel the water coming down violently, a flourish of heavy synths pouring out in torrents, while on “Ship of Theseus” little electronic swirls crest and break like waves all around. It is a document not just of nostalgia for these conditions but affection as well: Jewel admires the downpour and the blizzard. They suit his temperament. One can well imagine him in the throes of making this album—fixed in a reverie in the arid heat of L.A., stirring up for us so effectively and poignantly his fondest memories of the much-missed sleet and rain.